Posts Tagged ‘Jill Stanek’

Here are the top 10 reasons Barack Obama has variously stated why he voted against Illinois’ Born Alive Infant Protection Act when state senator.

10. Babies who survive their abortions are not protected by the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Speaking against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act on the IL Senate floor on March 30, 2001, Obama, the sole verbal opponent to the bill stated:

… I just want to suggest… that this is probably not going to survive constitutional scrutiny.

Number one, whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a – child, a nine-month-old – child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place.

I mean, it – it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute. For that purpose, I think it would probably be found unconstitutional.

9. A ban to stop aborted babies from being shelved to die would be burdensome to their mothers. She alone should decide whether her baby lives or dies. Before voting “no” for a 2nd time in the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 5, 2002, Obama stated:

What we are doing here is to create one more burden on women, and I can’t support that.

During a speech at Benedictine University in October 2004, Obama said, according to the Illinois Leader, that “the decision concerning a baby should be left to a woman, but that he does not see himself as supportive of abortion.”

8. Wanting to stop live aborted babies from being shelved to die was all about politics. During that same speech at Benedictine University, Obama said, according to the Illinois Leader, “the bill was unnecessary in Illinois and was introduced for political reasons.”

7. There was no proof. Also during the Benedictine University speech, Obama said, according to the Illinois Leader, that “there was no documentation that hospitals were actually doing what was alleged in testimony presented before him in committee.”

6. Aborting babies alive and letting them die is a doctor’s prerogative. An Obama spokesman told the Chicago Tribune in August 2004 that Obama voted against Born Alive because it included provisions that “would have taken away from doctors their professional judgment when a fetus is viable.”

5. Anyway, doctors don’t do that. Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times in October 2004 he opposed Born Alive because “physicians are already required to use life-saving measures when fetuses are born alive during abortions.”

4. Aborting babies alive and letting them die is a religious issue. During their U.S. Senate competition Alan Keyesfamously said:

Christ would not stand idly by while an infant child in that situation died…. Christ would not vote for Barack Obama, because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved.

Obama has always mischaracterized Keyes’ rationale for condemning Obama by implying Keyes was simply making a statement against Obama’s pro-abortion position, which is untrue. Keyes pointedly stated he was condemning Obama for his support of infanticide.

Nevertheless, live birth abortion must be included in the list of procedures Obama condones. Obama responded first to Keyes by saying, as quoted in his July 10, 2006, USA Today op ed:

… [W]e live in a pluralistic society, and that I can’t impose my religious views on another.

3. Aborting babies alive and letting them die violates no universal principle. In the same USA Today piece, Obama said he reflected on that first answer, decided it was a “typically liberal response,” and revised it:

… But my opponent’s accusations nagged at me…. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons but seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

2. Sinking Born Alive was simply about political oneupsmanship. Obama has this quote on his website:

Pam Sutherland, the president and CEO of the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council, told ABC News. “We worked with him specifically on his strategy. The Republicans were in control of the Illinois Senate at the time. They loved to hold votes on ‘partial birth’ and ‘born alive’. They put these bills out all the time… because they wanted to pigeonhole Democrats….”

And the #1 reason Obama voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act was:

1. The IL Born Alive Infant Protection Act was a ploy to undercut Roe v. Wade. During a debate against Keyes in October 2004, Obama stated:

Now, the bill that was put forward was essentially a way of getting around Roe vs. Wade…. At the federal level, there was a similar bill that passed because it had an amendment saying this does not encroach on Roe vs. Wade. I would have voted for that bill.

This was an out-and-out lie. The definition of “born alive” in the federal and Illinois versions were identical. The only difference came in paragraph (c), which was originally identical in both versions but changed on the federal level.

Illinois’ paragraph (c): A live child born as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law.

Federal paragraph (c): Nothing in this section shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being “born alive” as defined in this section.

When the senator sponsoring the IL bill tried to amend IL’s paragraph (c), Amendment 1 below, to be the same as the federal paragraph (c), Barack Obama himself, as chairman of the committee hearing the bill, refused, and he then also killed the bill (click to enlarge).

When a candidate for President of a major political party is so depraved that he supports infanticide, you know that we are a nation in moral and spiritual crisis.

You thought late term partial birth abortion was barbaric? How about the murder of babies who have actually been born?

Columnist Linda Chavez wrote a piece about how Obama’s support for infanticide will cost him amongst Catholics (even nominal Catholics). It should cost him the support of every human being who is capable of any compassion for human life.

Legislation to protect babies who survived premature inducement for the purpose of abortion (i.e., outside the mother’s body) began to form after Jill Stanek, a registered delivery-ward nurse in an Illinois hospital, testified that living babies had simply being allowed to die without any attempt to provide medical treatment. A federal law titled the Born Alive Infant Protection Act was signed into law by President Bush in 2002 after it passed by unanimous vote in the Senate.

NARAL Pro-Choice America issued a statement that it did not oppose passage of the law. Other abortion rights groups acknowledged that opposing it would be extreme.

But Barack Obama demonstrated just how radically committed he was to abortion. Even retroactive abortion. Even the killing by callous neglect of a little baby who had taken her first breaths of the very same air that you and I breathe. He voted against the Illinois state version of the law. When it went to the Health and Human Services Committee, which State Senator Obama chaired, he refused to ever allow it to come up for a vote. He shelved it from even getting a hearing, much the same way that slowly dying babies had been shelved in hospitals and abortion clinics. It would pass only after Obama left the state senate and his committee chairman’s gavel was passed to another senator.

Jill Stanek, the nurse who fought for the law in both Illinois and the nation’s capital, said of Obama:

We were in Springfield to lobby for passage of the state Born Alive Infant Protection Act, legislation that would require hospitals to care for infants who survive an abortion. Obama spoke against the legislation in 2001 and 2002 and single-handedly defeated it in committee in 2003.

My friend stood in Obama’s path and said, “Senator, we are going to pass Born Alive here in Illinois this year.”

Obama smiled smoothly and agreed, “I think you will,” adding, “I would have voted for the Born Alive Infant Protection Act in Illinois had it been worded the same as the federal bill. I think that’s the position the Democrats should take.”

There’s just one thing he forgot to mention: Obama had stopped his committee from adding the federal wording.

This is the very sort of slimeball, disingenuous, hypocritical tactic that I believe characterizes this man. Barack Obama, as a member of radical ACORN, registered voters and filed a lawsuit to prevent any attempt to prune voter rolls, and then cynically and hypocritically challenged every single voter signature in order to keep the popular incumbent off the ballot for the state senate.

Barack Obama is a man who is so callous that he repeatedly prevented a law that would have provided an innocent human baby, born in the midst of unimaginable cruelness, surviving outside of her mothers body, fighting for her life, a chance to live.

The Nazis coined a term, Lebensunwertes Leben, a life unworthy to be lived.

One night, a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted Down’s syndrome baby who was born alive to our Soiled Utility Room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a Soiled Utility Room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about ½ pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end, he was so quiet that I couldn’t tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart was still beating through his chest wall. After he was pronounced dead, we folded his little arms across his chest, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried him to the hospital morgue where all of our dead patients are taken.

She was forbidden from providing any lifesaving medical care. It tore at her conscience.

Barack Obama claims to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ. When Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me” (Luke 18:15), does Barack Obama believe that Jesus meant to perform retroactive abortions on them? Or did Jesus seek to love and bless these most innocent and precious members of the human race?

1 Timothy chapter four begins with these words: “Now the Holy Spirit tells us clearly that in the last times some will turn away from what we believe; they will follow lying spirits and teachings that come from demons. These teachers are hypocrites and liars. They pretend to be religious, but their consciences are dead.”

I can’t imagine anything more demonic than infanticide. And I can’t imagine any conscience being more dead than the one that supports infanticide.

There are tears in my eyes, because I can see that little baby slowly dying, his pitiful little gasps for air a silent testimony that the monstrous and immoral ideology of a life unworthy to be lived is still among us.